Review of Little Snapper (from realmacsoftware.com)

There is no shortage of screen-capture utilities, especially on the Mac side of the Great Divide, but finding a perfect app that does it all is tougher than it seems: Need to grab a web page that extends beyond the screen? Paparazzi will do it (for free), but it cannot do anything else. The website you are visiting happens to be mostly Flash? You’re out of luck. SnapzProX, the “gold standard” of Mac screen-capture utilities will do most things, but it’s awkward to use (I mean really wakward); SnapNDrag offers a basic, free version, but it only captures on-screen windows, with web pages out of reach. xScope is perfect at capturing the same area over-and-over again (it’s perfect for many other things too), but is otherwise, for screen capture, it’s quite limited. It would be really great to have just one app that could do it all.

CONTINUE >>> And although Little Snapper misses a few important features, it gets closer to perfection than any of the other one-trick-pony apps (it’s more like a Jack-of-all-trades, and everything that goes with it), and adds a few useful innovations into the mix. There is a realistically good chance that by the time its next, full-number release is out (current version reviewed here is 1.02) it could mature into a new “gold standard,” and perhaps even displace the rapidly aging SnapzProX (which, for screencast capture is being quickly overtaken by ScreenFlow).

There is little not to like about Little Snapper. If anything, there is the somewhat steep $39 price tag, which seems a little high for a utility that, unlike SnapzProX, does not capture video (just still images). Little Snapper can capture rectangular selections and specific windows on-screen (matching SnapzPro). It can also capture complete web pages: in this area it not only matches Paparazzi, but ups the ante by allowing you to browse websites inside Little Snapper, and select specific “intelligently selected” areas of the page (e.g., a specific DIV). Further, unlike Paparazzi, Little Snapper’s browsing ability supports Flash, so one can browse a Flash-based site and simply press Cmd-S to capture every phase of the browsing experience. Because Little Snapper captures not only the rendered image of the page, but also the underlying HTML, it is possible to export captures as PDFs in which the text remains searchable and selectable, a big plus from the point of view of being able to find something later.

Little Snapper’s developers decided to go beyond screen capture, and create a  utility that can also manage captured images in a visual browser that displays thumbnails, and allows the storage of some basic metadata with the images: the title, star-rating (1-5 stars, iTunes-style), the URL (in the case of web pages), the type of capture (Screenshot, Websnap, Graphic, Photo, Illustration, Mockup, iSight, iPhone, and Other), capture date, publish date, tags, and a free-form Note text field for a more detailed description. Little Snapper maes it easy to organize a capture library: image thumbnails and the associated metadata can be grouped into Collections, stored in multiple Folders, and there even are flexible, iTunes-style Smart Collections that select items on-the-fly based on specified criteria (for example, the website’s URL and capture’s star-rating, or tags).

But that’s not all: Little Snapper also has the ability to add several types of editable annotations as overlays on the captured image, allowing for highlights, callouts (lines and arrows), numbered notes boxes, and the ability to highlight or blur rectangular areas of the capture (see image, right). Each of those objects also includes some customization options (color and transparency, or font for text annotations). Annotations and overlays can be shown or hidden, and you can decide if they should be exported with the image or not when it’s taken outside of Little Snapper. The developers also created an online site where Little Snapper’s captures can be uploaded to be shared with others (in a way that is similar to how acrobat.com lets you share PDF files, or Apple lets you upload and share iWork ‘09 files).

Limitations: While Little Snapper offers quite a bit in terms of features and flexibility, there are some disappointing feature omissions. There are four features I would like to have: (1) timed capture (for example, after a 5-second delay), and auto-timed-capture (say, every 15 seconds); (2) the ability to capture the same, specific area of the screen on several consecutive captures (something that can easily be done in xScope, but is impossible here), and (3) the support for additional file formats (currently .jpg and .png, are supported, plus PDF image on text for webpage captures). I am missing especially TIFF-export, a standard format required by most professional software book publishers. It would be nice if the metadata added to the files (URLs, comments, ratings, tags / keywords) were exported with the images, so that it could become available when images are managed in Adobe Bridge or Lightroom 2 (I am talking standard metadata fields). The ability to (4) auto-convert captures to greyscale (something SnapzPro does without a problem) would make Little Snapper even more attractive to software training professionals, and software book authors.

Since the developers decided to include image annotation and some metadata features, one noticeable omission is the lack of a native Little Snapper file format for images and libraries that could accommodate shuffling captures and libraries/catalogs from one install of Little Snapper to another. For example, if I captured some website pages, added callouts, comments, and ratings, and would like to share this information with a colleague who also uses Little Snapper, currently there is no way for me to export individual images or a collection into a file format that could be imported into Little Snapper on another computer, with all the added information (URLs, overlays, and metadata) still editable. There is also no option to import an existing library of captures into a larger “master library.”

Sooner or later, any application that creates catalogs, needs some way to manage, export, import, merge and split them (a good example would be the evolution of catalog managing features in Adobe Lightroom 2). Hopefully, Little Snapper will get this ability in its next version. The addition of the missing features would make Little Snapper an unbeatable capture app on OS X.

Based on the developer’s blog, sometime in April ‘09, they plan to release Little Snapper for the iPhone (to be distributed through Apple’s App Store). It will be interesting to see if, and to what degree, this new, portable version of Little Snapper will integrate with its desktop version.